Kate's Wedding (11 page)

Kate took the woman’s leaflet, but the moment the conversation was over, she dropped the leaflet on the floor. And then promptly felt guilty and picked it up again. To alleviate her guilt, she made a show of reading the leaflet’s opening paragraph. Apparently, Mrs Cupcake had given up a ‘high-powered job in the City’ to indulge her ‘passion for baking’. Kate wondered which bank had let such an obvious asset go. Seven pounds fifty for a flipping cake you could pick up for twenty pence at a Brownies’ bring-and-buy sale. If that woman was really as busy as she claimed, she had found a way to turn flour into gold.

Kate was ready to leave the bridal fair long before her mother and her sister, but they insisted on the scheduled lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. Kate tried to make her excuses over the roast lamb.

‘Want to get back to London before the traffic gets bad,’ she said.

She just wanted to get the hell out of there. If she heard one more version of ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’, she thought she might scream. Not even the restaurant was safe. A Prince Charles impressionist was making the rounds of the tables, explaining how he could bring a bit of class to any ordinary wedding reception by announcing the speeches in the style of the future king.

‘Keep that man away from me,’ Kate hissed to her sister.

As if lunch wasn’t stressful enough, the strain of not mentioning the cancer was telling on everyone. Kate knew that her father wasn’t just tired from having looked after Lily. He was exhausted from all the bad news. Despite having plastered on the make-up, Elaine was looking grey with worry. Tess’s forced jollity was bordering on insanity. And somehow, pretending to be excited about bloody cupcakes just made the whole thing worse.

Diana and her mother were having an altogether better time. The Prince Charles impersonator who had given Kate the creeps was exactly what Diana was looking for.

‘We’ve got to have the Prince Charles impersonator, Mum, to tie in with the royal-wedding theme.’

Susie agreed that it was an excellent idea. It would fit in with the theme. Plus, Prince Charles’s £500 fee was one less pair of Louboutins for her ex-husband Dave’s new wife.

‘Quick lunch?’ Diana suggested. ‘Then I want to talk to someone about chair-dressing.’

Chapter Nineteen

While Kate was enduring the strained happiness of lunch in Washam, lucky Ian had spent the afternoon watching West Ham play Wigan. Ian was nuts about West Ham. He had been a season-ticket holder ever since he could afford it and attended home matches without fail. He had quite a group of mates among the regulars in his stand. They met for lunch before a match and went for a few beers afterwards. Kate could smell the beer on Ian’s breath as he hugged her when she got in.

‘How was the bridal fair?’ he asked.

‘A bit like my worst nightmare. I had no idea what a performance planning a wedding could be.’

‘Do you think so? It’s not going to take over my life,’ said Ian.

Kate sighed. ‘I feel like it’s already taking over mine. I don’t know why I let Tess persuade me to go. Can you believe there was some woman charging seven pounds fifty for a cupcake?’

‘Is that good?’ Ian asked.

‘Of course it’s not good,’ said Kate.

‘I could eat a cupcake now,’ said Ian. ‘Is there anything in the fridge?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Kate. ‘It doesn’t have a see-through door. Why don’t you have a look?’

‘Can’t be bothered,’ he said.

Kate frowned. She knew he would have eaten something had she put it right in front of him. He was just too lazy to fix something for himself.

‘Shall we watch some telly?’ Ian asked. ‘I’ll even let you watch a fascinating documentary about Prince Charles’s “other mistress” if you’re good.’

‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ said Kate.

‘Football highlights it is.’

Kate sat beside Ian on the sofa, but her mind wasn’t on the football. Instead, she carried on a text conversation with Helen, bringing her up to speed with Elaine’s treatment plan and telling her all about the horrors of the bridal fair. Helen responded in kind with the horrors of a Saturday spent ferrying small children to swimming class and ballet practice. Her youngest child had vomited in the pool. These texts were what Helen called her ‘mummy moans’.

One day, when you’ve got a house full of screaming toddlers, you’ll look back on that bridal fair and long for those simpler times,
Helen assured her.

Stop it,
Kate responded.
You’re making me want to get unengaged.

Don’t you dare,
said Helen.
I haven’t been to a decent wedding since 1998.

That was the year Helen, their mutual friend Anne and Kate’s sister got hitched. Kate had been bridesmaid three times.

That night, Kate had a dream about the last flat-share she lived in before she could afford to rent a place on her own. The dream did not bring back happy memories and when she woke up, she found herself thinking about the end of that particular period of her life and it filled her with fresh sadness.

It had all come to a head over the August bank-holiday weekend of 1997.

Kate was used to being woken in the middle of the night. The grotty Lavender Hill flat she shared with two Italian language students and an Australian beautician had a bus-stop situated right outside it. When the 345 to South Kensington via Clapham Junction stopped there, as it did several times an hour, the rumble of the ancient Routemaster’s diesel engine shook the entire building like a six on the Richter scale. When Kate took the single room in the flat, which was all she could afford on a trainee lawyer’s wages, she told herself she could live with it. And most of the time she could. But after a year, she was aware that she hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since she moved in. It wasn’t just the rumble of the buses; drunken revellers tumbling off at the stop showed no consideration as they shouted their goodnights.

So when she heard someone scream at five o’clock in the morning that Sunday of the August bank-holiday weekend, Kate was not unduly disturbed. She rolled over to face her sleeping partner for the night. He was snoring lightly. His name was Jake, or Jack; she wasn’t entirely sure. She did know that she’d met him at the Sofa Bar, a funky wine bar further up Lavender Hill towards the Junction, furnished with old sofas that left you itching. Jack or Jake had been drinking there with someone she vaguely knew from law school. The connection made it seem safe to bring him home.

Why had she done that? Was he so good-looking? She couldn’t really tell in the soft orange glow of the streetlight through the cheap window blinds. Had he kept her in stitches all night? She couldn’t remember him having been particularly funny. Was it just that he had shown some sign of wanting her? That, Kate was beginning to understand, was pretty much the only connection between the men she had brought back to her flat in the previous six months. There had been five of them. Five lovers – if you could call them that – in the six months since she broke up with Matt, the boyfriend she’d had since her first term at university. Now Matt, a junior doctor, was engaged to an intensive-care nurse and had apparently just bought a family house in Edinburgh. Kate was . . . Well, Kate was twenty-six years old, working all hours, living in a shared flat, where there was never enough hot water for four girls to take four showers in the morning, and bringing home God only knows who in the hope they might turn out to be the One.

‘Are you the One?’ Kate asked the man sleeping alongside her. Fragments of the previous evening came back to her now. His name was Jack, definitely. He worked for Arthur Andersen. He came from somewhere up north. He liked rugby. He was wearing an England shirt. He had been drinking, unusually, sambuca. He told Kate that the three coffee beans in the bottom were supposed to bring you luck: health, happiness and prosperity. Or had he? Kate thought that perhaps one of her Italian flatmates had told her that instead.

Kate lay back down on her pillow. She knew she should get up and have a drink of water. Her hangover was already coming together nicely. But she didn’t want to clamber over Jack. Having agreed to three sambucas of her own after four large glasses of dog-rough red wine, she wasn’t certain she could make it without throwing up. If Jack was the One, it would hardly be the best way to cement their relationship. And so Kate tried to avert the worst of the hangover by lying very still and listening to the sounds on the street outside.

Down by the bus-stop, someone actually wailed.

‘Diana!’

Kate closed her eyes tightly. If someone was being murdered outside her flat, she didn’t want to know.

At eight o’clock, thirst forced Kate out of bed at last. Giuliana was already in the kitchen, making a cup of proper coffee with the pot that her mother had sent over from Milan. As Giuliana turned from the hob, Kate saw at once that her flatmate was red-eyed from crying.

‘She dead,’ said Giuliana. ‘She dead. She ’ad a car crash.’

The radio, tuned to Radio One as usual, played incongruous classical music. And then a news bulletin. Kate sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs and accepted an espresso as she took in the full story. Giuliana had never offered to make her coffee before.

‘She so young,’ said Guiliana. ‘Her little children.’

Kate expressed her disbelief and was surprised to find tears springing to her own eyes. It seemed impossible that the woman who had blossomed from a shy nursery worker and royal fiancée into the most famous woman in the world could actually have died. Then, as the flatmates were sharing their sympathy for the children left behind, Jack wandered in. He had his shoes in his hand as though he had been hoping to sneak out without waking anybody. He locked eyes with Giuliana over the coffeepot. There was a moment of confused silence.

‘Jack?’ she asked.

‘Christ,’ said Jack. ‘I thought this flat looked familiar.’

That’s how Kate discovered she had inadvertently brought home her flatmate’s ex-fiancé. And that’s why, whenever anyone asked her if she remembered where she was when she heard Princess Diana died, Kate would say, ‘I’d rather not.’

It was an awful day, one of the worst, but no matter how terrible it was, that day did mark the end of a particularly bleak period in Kate’s life.

Giuliana would not forgive Kate her mistake. As such, it was impossible to stay in the flat, and a couple of weeks later, Kate moved out of the shared flat and into a tiny bedsit on her own. She had no choice. She couldn’t face another flat-share with strangers. Her best friends, Helen and Anne, were already both living with their future husbands. It was the first time Kate had lived alone, and she liked it. At the same time, Kate cut down on her drinking and resolved to stay away from one-night stands. Freed from the tyranny of regular hangovers, she started taking her job more seriously, setting herself on the path to early partnership. Pretty soon she was earning enough to put down a deposit on a little flat in Stockwell.

In a way, Princess Diana’s death had focused Kate’s mind as much as Giuliana’s fury. We don’t know how much time we have, was the message she took from Diana. Just as important as taking her job more seriously and cutting back on the booze, Kate would not waste another moment mourning Matt.

Of course, Kate had lapses. Her love life was not entirely successful from 1997 on. She had certainly wasted a long time on Dan, but at last, thirteen years after that awful weekend, her life could safely be said to have come together well. She had Ian now. If only her mother could get through the cancer, life would be pretty much perfect. Waking up the day after the bridal fair, Kate prayed that everything would be all right.

The last time she had prayed so hard was January 1997, when Matt left her. It hadn’t worked then. Making coffee later that morning, Kate wondered what had happened to the man she used to love.

Chapter Twenty

‘Darling, please. Just for me. You said I could have whatever I wanted.’

Diana stuck out her bottom lip. Ben knew she was doing it deliberately, playing the little girl whose father could refuse her nothing. Ben had seen Diana’s father crumble in the face of that look a thousand times. Well, Dave wasn’t being asked to dress up like bloody Prince William for an ‘engagement shoot’. Ben wasn’t going to crumble for that.

‘What do we need an engagement picture for, anyway?’ Ben had asked. ‘I’ve never heard of that happening.’

‘All the best photographers offer an engagement shoot these days,’ Diana was only too happy to explain. ‘It’s not just a freebie. It’s an ideal way to get to know the bride and groom ahead of the day. Get to see what angles they look best from. Hear more about their vision for the day itself.’

‘Vision?’ Ben echoed.

‘Yes,
vision
. And I envision our wedding as the best day of our lives. I want the photographs to match and that, Ben, means taking it seriously from the start. You can’t expect the photographer just to turn up on the morning of the wedding and get it right.’

‘But dressing up as Kate Middleton and Prince William? That’s not what I call taking it seriously. That sounds like a joke.’

‘Ben,’ Diana snapped, ‘why do you have to question everything I ask of you? I want to recreate that engagement shoot because I think we will look great in it. Everyone says I’ve got something of Kate Middleton about me and you are much better-looking than Prince William. Besides, it will be fun.’ Diana linked her arm through Ben’s arm and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘And it’s appropriate. We got engaged on the very same day as them, didn’t we? And we’re getting married the day after the royal wedding. They’ve been going out for about the same length of time. That makes their story really relevant to ours. I think it would be a nice touch to have a picture like their engagement picture.’